In Memoriam: Peter Falk

It’s surprising to learn, from reading biographical sketches of Peter Falk on the occasion of his death, at the age of eighty-three, that he got a master’s degree in public administration and was working in Connecticut as an efficiency expert when, in his mid-twenties, he decided to take a chance on an acting career. It’s equally odd to note that he had two Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actor in consecutive years—1960 and 1961—for his roles in “Murder, Inc.” and “A Pocketful of Miracles.” They hardly helped. He was working mainly on television, doing some movies but not getting plum roles, when, in 1967, he met John Cassavetes at a Lakers game and then had lunch with him at the Paramount commissary. As Marshall Fine writes in his biography of Cassavetes, “Accidental Genius,” “Falk had a script by Elaine May, ‘Mikey and Nicky,’ that he thought Cassavetes would be perfect for.” At the same time, Cassavetes pitched “Husbands” to Falk. Each actor thought the other had agreed to the projects, and each had misunderstood.

Well, both got made—“Husbands” was shot in 1969; “Mikey and Nicky,” in 1973—and Falk’s artistic immortality is assured by his work with Cassavetes. “Husbands” is one of the great outpourings of pent-up emotion in cinematic history; it’s a men’s-liberation movement unto itself, complete with all the self-indulgence, self-punishment, and cruelty that spews forth from the puncturing of the male ego. In the trio of husbands (which includes Ben Gazzara), Falk plays something of the superego—a dentist, proud, touchy, and tremulous, who has the hardest time pulling away from his settled life and who, when calling himself to reason and responsibility, does it with a wrenching, viperish violence.

It’s similar to the role he plays in May’s “Mikey and Nicky,” a story of small-time gangland, in which Nicky (Cassavetes) is being hunted by an incensed crime boss and calls on his best friend, Mikey (Falk), a member of the same gang, to help him get away. Where Nicky is a free-and-easy ladies’ man, Mikey is a responsible family man—a role that, as in “Husbands,” comes with bitter implications (albeit radically different ones than emerge in Cassavetes’s film).

In between came Cassavetes’s “A Woman Under the Influence,” in which Falk played a road-crew laborer whose wife (played by Cassavetes’s wife, Gena Rowlands) is free-spirited and eccentric to the point of being considered mad. It’s a demanding and conflict-riven role, with its blend of tenderness and anger, compassion and frustration, bewilderment and assertiveness—and, as in “Husbands” and “Mikey and Nicky,” it’s the role of the straight man who copes with a more antic and less self-conscious partner.

It’s the work of a rationalist torn with passion. The dryly caustic humor he brings to his roles—even to his role as Columbo—is that of a quietly calculating intelligence that keeps that passion under pressure, and it’s the genius of Cassavetes to recognize, to reveal, and to deploy the tension and the heat that Falk—the actor and the man—gives off. As Falk said about working on “Husbands,” “There was no character. There was me.”

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